News

For the invention and development of electron spin sources and detectors, and their application to measurement science.

John Unguris received a B.S. in Physics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1973, and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Wisconsin in 1980. He initially joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Research Associate investigating the application of electron spin measurements to various surface sensitive spectroscopies. This work lead to the development of an electron microscopy technique for directly imaging magnetic nanostructures, Scanning Electron Microscopy with Polarization Analysis (SEMPA). He has since used SEMPA to measure the magnetic properties of a wide variety of structures including ultrathin patterned magnetic films, oscillatory exchange coupled magnetic multilayers, and multiferroic heterostructures. He is currently a Project Leader in the Electron Physics Group in the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, where he is leading multiple projects investigating the fundamental physics of magnetic nanostructures. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and has been awarded a Bronze Medal from the Department of Commerce, and is a member of AVS and APS.

UW-Madison has dozens of scientists — including graduate students and postdoctoral fellows — involved in the experiments, analysis, data handling and computation at the Large Hadron Collider. Research has resumed at the 27-mile tunnel on the Swiss-French border after two years spent raising its power.

The Department of Physics participated in making Operation Military Kids University 2015 a success: http://www.news.wisc.edu/23844. Wonders of Physics student workers Emily Ehlerding and Jake Nesbit helped with hands-on demonstrations. Wisconsin 4-H Military Kids programs support the nearly 15,000 Wisconsin youth in military families. To learn more about Wisconsin 4-H Military Kids and the opportunities available to Wisconsin youth, visit http://fyi.uwex.edu/wiomk/.

Dr. Kurt Retherford (BS ’94) Exploring Europa

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Dr. Kurt Retherford, BS ’94, is the lead scientist for one of nine instruments that NASA recently selected to include on its next mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa. While an undergraduate researcher in the Physics department (Scherb & Roesler labs) he began studying the moons of Jupiter. Now at the Southwest Research Inst., he recently used the Hubble Space Telescope to co-discover evidence for large plumes of water vapor emitted from Europa’s icy surface that may connect to a habitable subsurface ocean.

Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Fellowships

Generous grants from the Hilldale Foundation and the Wisconsin State Legislature provide for awards of $3,000 each to undergraduate students and $500–$1,000 to their faculty/staff advisors to work in collaboration on research projects.

Noah Johnson

Colin Wahl

Bai Yang Wang

An Exploratory Study of Charge Noise and Mobility for Improved Performance in Semiconductor Quantum Devices

Yufan Xu

(Cary Forest)

Hardening of Materials Using Plasma Immersion Ion Implantation (PIII)

Theodore Herfurth & Teddy Kubly Awards

A generous grant from the Herfurth and Kubly families provides for these longstanding awards which honor senior students exemplifying a composite of superior academic achievement, community service and leadership in extra and co-curricular activities, financial self-support, and both prepared and extemporaneous oral expression.

Nicholas Derr

The LHC is back in business, now ready for proton-proton collisions at a record 13 TeV

Sunday, April 5, 2015

After two years of intense maintenance and consolidation, and several months of preparation for restart, the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, is back in operation. Today at 10.41am, a proton beam was back in the 27-kilometer ring, followed at 12.27pm by a second beam rotating in the opposite direction. These beams circulated at their injection energy of 450 GeV. Over the coming days, operators will check all systems before increasing energy of the beams.

High on a sleeping Mexican volcano, a new particle astrophysics observatory is about to blink to life, commencing an all-sky search for very high-energy gamma rays — a search that could greatly expand the catalog of known gamma ray sources and chip away at the mystery of the cosmic rays that constantly bombard our planet.

IceCube, the cubic kilometer, sub-polar detector that in 2013 gathered the first-ever evidence of cosmic neutrinos, is the star of particle astrophysics at the South Pole. Soon, however, a complementary detector known as the Askaryan Radio Array or ARA will join the hunt for the highest energy neutrinos.